It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  But after my dad died, everybody brought over food–tons and tons of food for weeks and weeks, and I got the message that food comforts you, food is your friend, and now it still is, except it’s not a very good friend, so it’s time for me to go cold turkey on the sweets. (Yes, alcohol has a lot of calories too, and giving up beer and wine would probably help too, but I can’t give up all my phony stress reducers, now can I?)

  I have been trying for a week and have lost two pounds. Of course, that was on two different scales, so it might just be a calibration difference.

  I sure hope we get good news about this treatment. I don’t know if I can resist the siren song of the double chocolate muffins if we don’t.

  That Lonesome Valley

  One night I dream that Kirsten and I are in the hospital, and we are both getting chemo. Suddenly I have this moment where I realize–hey, wait a minute! Do I have cancer? I immediately check my testicles. No…I rack my brains trying to remember what part of my body it’s in. And then I realize that I don’t have cancer at all. So what am I doing here getting chemo?

  This is the thought that wakes me up, and I lie there in the dark kind of confused in that just-woke-from-a-weird-dream kind of way. Eventually I wake up enough to realize that no, I don’t have cancer. I guess this is my subconscious trying to tell me that I feel like I am having this same experience, that, you know, as Sam and Dave said, when something is wrong with my baby, something is wrong with me.

  And while this is true to a certain extent, it also is not true in a pretty important way. I worry about Kirsten, I sleep like shit, I eat too much, but the bottom line is that I’m not sick. And she is. And I can’t be where she is. I have felt this very keenly at times–sometimes in the early days after the diagnosis, or after a particularly bad piece of news, Kirsten would be kind of withdrawn, or just depressed, and I would try so hard to cheer her up that I would just be annoying, and I realized that she is just in a place where I’m not. I can imagine what it’s like being there, but I’m not there, and she is.

  I think about this when she is in the hospital. As I leave her alone in her room with the chemo pumping into her veins, she seems very alone to me. Even when I am sitting next to her, I am not with her. She is fighting for her life, and while, you know, I can sort of be Burgess Meredith in the corner, she is the one trying to go the distance with Apollo Creed.

  The Carter Family, of course, have a song that speaks directly to this whole thing. It’s called “Lonesome Valley,” and it goes:

  Everybody’s got to walk

  That lonesome valley

  They got to walk

  It by themselves

  There’s nobody here

  Can walk it for them

  They got to walk

  It by themselves.

  It then goes on to substitute, “my mother” “my father” and something unintelligible for “everybody.” As usual, they are right on target. I suppose what they are really talking about is that you ultimately have to die alone (unless, you know, you are in a plane crash or something), but I also take it to mean when you are suffering, when you are struggling, you have to do it by yourself. It says on the back of the CD that this cheerful little number was a number one hit for them, which just goes to show you that the pop charts were a very very different place in the 1930s.

  So Kirsten has to walk that lonesome valley by herself. If it was me, I would be thinking constantly about death. I don’t really know what she thinks of– I guess when she is in the midst of treatment it is pretty easy to just focus on the moment–now my muscles ache like hell, now I have to puke–and not worry about eternity. But I know she is scared sometimes; she is living most people’s worst nightmare.

  I think about this as I walk down the corridor inside the bone marrow transplant bubble ward one day and see all the patients in their johnnies. Most doors are open, and most of the people are in bed, but I look in at all these people and think, well, they got up this morning. They are walking that lonesome valley by themselves, and most people live in fear of being where these people are, but they got up today, and they are doing it, and that lady who was on oxygen yesterday isn’t today, and while some of these people won’t make it and others will walk out of here and be well for decades, today I feel, and I know that this sounds like the kind of cheesy, facile, inspirational crap I have been mocking for months, but I am inspired by all these bald people in blue johnnies. I know second hand how fucking hard this is, and when I see a guy shuffle down the hallway just to look out the window, I just think well, shit, there goes a superhero. And this doesn’t make me think, oh well, I should really appreciate what I have or anything like that, it does not for a second give me any perspective because I am a self-centered shit, but it does make me proud to be a human. Whatever it is that lets these people get up and eat their shitty hospital food and shuffle down the hallways and live every day, you and I have it too–we must, because I don’t for a second believe this well-meaning bullshit that several people have shoveled my way about how God only gives us what we can handle. What about the people who are tortured to death and die screaming? Is God up there figuring, well, a certain number of broom handles need to get inserted into rectums today, so I will pick the people who are strong enough? I don’t know much about God, but I sure don’t want to believe in one that operates that way.

  So I don’t believe that these people’s diseases hovered around looking for somebody who could handle being sick. They are people like you and me who are sick. Today these people are not scary and pathetic to me (though they might well be tomorrow and they sure as hell were yesterday). Today they are superheroes, not because they are special, but because they aren’t.

  Exile on My Street

  Well of course I go out and buy a copy of Exile on Main Street within a few days of obsessing about “Tumblin’ Dice,” and when I get the CD I am disappointed to see that the song is referred to everywhere as “Tumbling Dice,” which just seems kind of odd because Mick never says the “g,”and if you pronounce the name of the song with the “g” on it, it just sounds dorky. I still have no fucking idea what that song is about. Ironically, my mom calls me while I am in the record store, and we have a nice conversation, mostly, (more on that in a bit), and she says that since I am in the record store, I should buy her this other CD she wants to make up for the one I stole from her, and I sort of consider it, but I laugh and say no way. She is trying hard, but I still don’t feel guilty. Not sure why.

  The rest of the record is good, but I am not sure it’s as amazingly mindbendingly good as everybody says it is. The song that catches my attention most at first is “Rocks Off,” which leads off the record and in which Mick complains that he only gets his rocks off when he’s sleeeeeeeeepin, and given the state of my life right now I can sympathize, even though I find it hard to believe that that was ever really a problem for Mick, who, if you believe what you read, (and you know I do when it comes to celebrity gossip) has gotten his rocks off more or less every twenty minutes for the last forty years or so. I mention this to Danny on the phone, and he confesses that he shared my puzzlement, and finally concluded that Mick is not talking about actual ejaculation, but just basically saying that the thing that he really most enjoys is sleeping. Given the state of my life right now, I sympathize with that interpretation too.

  We have Kirsten home for a few days, and it is very nice. She definitely seems much better than she did after her first megadose and stem cell transplant. Nan is here helping out, and she does stuff like do the daily cleaning I am too feeble to do and take Kirsten to “day camp” at the hospital. She has to go in every day to get fluids and get blood drawn and tested, and they tell her that if she spikes a fever of 100.5, she is back in for ten days.

  It’s nice to have Kirsten here rather than in the hospital, and Nan is really the perfect helper, (and now seems like a good time to give a shout out to her husband and three kids, who go spouse- and mom-less for ten days while she’s here,
and her mother in law, who flies down to Louisiana to stay with them while Nan is up here) and I am sullen as hell. Part of this is just being nervous about what’s coming up, and part of it is that Kirsten deteriorates every day she’s home, and it’s just hard to have her be so sick. Except for her forays into day camp, she basically camps out on the couch, and drinks lots of fluids and eats less each day, and I know this is just the treatment and not the disease, but it makes me sad to see her like this.

  It is also a weird week at work because the students are all gone doing internships at local radio stations, government offices, hospitals, etc. I guess it’s a nice opportunity for them, and it is also sort of nice to have some time to do those things I have been meaning to do but haven’t gotten around to, and none of the meetings we have are too painful, but the bottom line is that I didn’t get into teaching to hang around with grown-ups all day. It is draining. It’s also depressing, because the pace is much slower than normal, so I have lots of time to just ponder how fucked up my life is right now, and one of my co-workers announces that she is pregnant, and she is a lovely woman and will be a great mom, and I want to be happy for her, but I am an evil little gnome, and all I am is jealous that other people have things to be happy about, while my big news is that Kirsten is officially neutropenic, which means she has basically no white blood cells, and did I mention that we are waiting to find out if this treatment that almost killed her has worked or not?

  One day I am sad all day because I had a dream about being in some kind of funeral home looking at urns and touring crematoriums or something. The dream carries the emotional reality of the terrible horror of going through all that funeral shit, and I have a bad dream hangover all day, and I just feel sad, and there are no kids to make me think about anything else, just piles of shit on my desk that represent stuff I haven’t done because I didn’t want to do it.

  I decide that after Nan leaves, I will take care of Rowen by myself. I have taken her to school early a few days, admittedly with mixed results, but I am optimistic, and she will refuse to spend much time with anybody else in the evening, and I can go visit Kirsten in the hospital during the day, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have anybody else here. Also, as much as it is helpful to have people here, it is also kind of draining. You just never really get to relax when someone else is in your space.

  My decision goes over like a lead balloon with both sets of parents. My mom offers on the phone, “Oh. Well, that’s a pretty long day for Rowen,” and I say, “Thanks for your input,” and she gives me one of these things where she is yelling but sort of laughing and saying that it’s not like she’s so controlling and she does have some expertise to share, you know. And I know that she wants to feel valued and useful, and who doesn’t, but I try to explain that when she says something like, “that’s a long day for her” as though I haven’t considered it, it really doesn’t come across as sharing expertise.

  Nan breaks the news to Kirsten’s mom–(well, her mom too)–on Saturday they are coming up to take Nan and Rowen to lunch while I take Kirsten to day camp. Day camp totally blows. It is boring as hell, and Kirsten is content to just space out or snooze. We watch several cooking shows on TV, including one where this woman makes this incredible over the top dish that involves cooking in a tomato sauce the following items: sausages, meatballs, and beef stuffed with prosciutto. I just about hork right there.

  When we get back from day camp, Kirsten’s mom is sitting on the couch. She says that Nan, Rowen, and Kirsten’s dad went out to lunch and she, inexplicably, stayed here. They stay gone for about another hour, and Kirsten’s mom says almost nothing during that time. Clearly she is pissed about something, but neither Kirsten or I have the energy to drag it out of her, so I just sort of assume it’s the news she got about me wanting to go it alone.

  But I suppose it could be something else. I get sort of bummed out wondering if our relationships with our parents are going to survive this whole thing. Right now, though, I am really more worried about whether Kirsten is going to survive this whole thing, so I guess I will go on gleefully offending everybody and hope they forgive me for it later.

  Kirsten is in pretty bad shape after we get home from day camp–not emotionally, just physically. Her temperature climbs from 99.1 to 99.9 to 100.1. I remember the last time Nan was here and Kirsten’s temperature climbed slowly over the course of a day, and I am convinced that it will hit 100.5 and she will need to go in again, and this depresses the hell out of me, because as much as it is hard to have her here being sick, it is harder to have her not here at all for ten days. Every time I haul out the thermometer, though, Kirsten says, “I’m not going in tonight. I’ve got one more night at home.” She is right. She crashes at about seven o’clock, and I shove a thermometer into her mouth before letting her sleep. Her temperature is 99.9. Reprieved, she heads off to bed. Knowing I won’t have to drive, I pour myself a glass of wine, pop a movie in the VCR and watch with joy as the Toxic Avenger deals gruesome death to the evildoers of Tromaville.

  Another One Bites the Dust

  Kirsten eventually spikes a fever and goes back into the hospital on Sunday, and Nan leaves on Tuesday. My tenure as a single parent does not have an auspicious beginning. I do an ok job getting Rowen off to school and putting dinner on the table at night, and getting her bathed and tucked in and everything, and then in the middle of the night on Tuesday, mind you I have been on the job on my own for less than a day, Rowen starts crying and complaining that her stomach hurts. She has been known to malinger in the middle of the night, but as I talk to her I am convinced that she is really in pain. Of course the first thing I think of is how that kid from Poltergeist died after going into the hospital with stomach pains, because that is just how my mind works, but I convince myself it’s probably gas, brought on in part by the apple she had for dinner. I put her in a warm bath (at 12:30 a.m.!), hoping that will move things along, and sure enough, as soon as she gets out she hops on the toilet and does a rather spectacular poo.

  I am pretty proud of myself for being so resourceful, and she goes back to bed, and I am almost back to sleep when I hear this, “ack! ack!” and I run into her room and she has puked all over her sheets. So I strip the bed and wipe it out of her hair and it is just a terrible scene, because she pukes again 20 minutes later, and then again, and then again, and so on from 12:30 until 4:00. Because I am not thinking clearly, I don’t just put clothes on and get up–each time she finishes, I figure, well, she’s got to be done now and go back to bed, and then just as we are both almost back to sleep, she pukes again. We both stay home the next day and end up having a pretty good day together. She has made a complete recovery by about 7:00 A.M., and we have a funny scene as she is sucking down orange juice and munching cheerios and I am on the phone with the nurse at her pediatrician’s office, and she is telling me, “keep her off of solid foods until dinner time. Water and apple juice are ok, but no citrus juices.” This is the second time in a week I have flouted medical advice. Last week Rowen had her yearly checkup, and I had to wrestle her while she screamed bloody murder to get her to be moderately still when they took her blood, so when they called me to tell me her cholesterol was elevated and we needed to have her do a fasting test because the test is really not accurate, I said no way, we don’t eat meat and she won’t drink milk and didn’t you just say the test isn’t accurate, and they pushed me, so I played the cancer card and they stopped.

  Kirsten’s mom ends up coming up that day so that I can have some time to see Kirsten in the hospital. Whatever weirdness was going on before seems to have passed, and I really do appreciate having her here–I needed help, and she provided it.

  That night after Rowen has gone to bed, Kirsten’s mom is reading a mystery novel (this one is part of a series with a mystery-antiques connection, not to be confused with the many different series with a mystery-cat connection, though I wouldn’t swear that there’s no cat living in the antique store) and I am playing video games, and t
he phone rings. It is my mom, and she informs me that my grandfather is dead.

  This news means nothing to me. Not because I hate the guy, but because he is just nothing to me. He left his family when my mom was nine, and this was actually kind of a relief from his alcoholism and abuse, and to say he was not close with his children is a tremendous understatement. I saw him a handful of times at family gatherings where he was always either actively annoying or slightly out of it, except for the one time when he and my uncle got in a fistfight for reasons too stupid to get into, but all you need to know about the man’s popularity among his descendants is that I was standing next to 2 of my cousins when the fight broke out between their father and grandfather, and I still remember them whispering through clenched teeth, “Get him, dad! Get him!”

  So I console my mom a little bit, and she is upset, though she kind of can’t figure out why because, as she says, she’s not going to miss him and she doesn’t really care that he’s dead, and that may sound harsh, but given the stories I have heard, the guy will be lucky if there’s not a conga line across his grave.

  We talk for a few minutes, and I go back to playing my video game, because I had almost figured out how to rescue the two…well, never mind.

  Though I do go back to the video game, I also keep turning the conversation over in my mind, and I realize what a total shit I’ve been regarding both my parents and Kirsten’s parents. My mom is sad because she doesn’t care that her father is dead, and I think, well, shit, as much as this whole thing has been a strain on all of our relationships, the bottom line is that they love us a lot and they are doing the best they can for us, and maybe I should be a little bit less persnickety about whether they are always doing everything exactly the way I want them to. I mean, just being able to say that they love us and are doing their best for us is something that my mom was never able to say about her father, and something I guess a lot of people can never say. It’s a tremendous gift, and I feel bad for having looked askance at it even for a second.